Self-Powered Biosensor for Water Toxicity Monitoring

Contamination of water supplies with toxic inorganic chemicals and toxic inorganic materials (TIC/TIMs) is a major concern for the U.S. military due to their worldwide prevalence and accessibility. Traditional, analyte-specific approaches are unfeasible to detect the approximately 70,000 potential TIC/TIM contaminants. Biologically-based sensor systems have the potential to provide general information on whether a source of water is contaminated and can be sensitive to a wide variety of toxicants. However, currently biologically-based sensors based on bioluminescence and other technologies suffer from several key disadvantages. For instance, current sensors suffer from poor sensitivity to a wide enough variety of toxins and are too large or unstable for practical field deployable devices. Lynntech proposes a novel sensing device using an enzymatic biofuel cell (BFC) as a self-powered biosensor for detecting toxins in water. The advantages of the BFC-based approach include the ability to detect a diverse variety of toxins, to operate simply, and to be implemented into a compact, low power hand-held device. Lynntech in collaboration with the University of New Mexico will utilize a novel enzyme immobilization approach to greatly extend the life of the BFC-based biosensors under harsh storage and operational conditions.